Coding

Time for another re-invention I think… but what next?

TehGrumpyCoder — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:19:27 GMT

My own very recent personal experience mirrors this blog post:

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

So what do I do to deal with that? Looking at Vivek’s advice, item number 1 is to move into management … yikes… I firmly believe that if someone thought I had the chops to be a manager it would have happened 20 years ago… nobody wants to make me a boss, trust me :) besides which, I like coding!

Item 2 sucks… and goes totally against the American Dream of continually moving up… expect to earn less?

And Item 3 is even worse… the implication is that you may not even be able to code in later years… how about this quote: “To be writing code for a living when you’re 50, you will need to be a rock-star developer and be able to out-code the new kids on the block.” … so since I’m writing code for a living at age 62 – WTF does *that* mean?

I consider all ‘re-inventions’ to be versions.

You’re sort of in version 1.0 as you go through K-12, since not everyone goes to college, but if I consider V1.0 to be a continuation of education, then mine took a side-step when I played guitar for a living, drove a truck for a living, and spent 3 years in the Army (70-73)… I think those were probably V2.0 and then actually getting back to school and earning a B.S. and M.S. (Electrical Engineering) probably was V1.5, but we branched the codebase on that one.

So V3.0 was finally hitting the working world as a hardware engineer in January of ‘77. I always did software, so switching completely to software in ‘81 was V4.0 That began yet another progression of Assembler, Pascal, C, then Windows and C++, then I broke out of the large company corporate world for the 3rd time in ‘95 and went with smaller companies doing Windows coding, call that V4.5 since it was still part of the progression.

But then one of the common problems happened… I was happy, doing good stuff, being productive, getting accolades and improving my chops, but I was still doing win32 desktop while all the young guys were learning .NET and the web.

Blam… I find myself out of work in 2005, and I have to very quickly churn out Me V5.0 to support .NET web database apps. This version went out fast… no Unit Tests, no QA, just get the version out the door, so although I’m doing the work, my knowledge is only “work deep”.

But I’m feeling pretty good as I’m hitting my stride on that one… I’m doing WPF/E then Silverlight (all on the side), get MVP (4 times so far), but what I’m doing all day is .NET web database code out to Oracle, Oracle Stored Procs, and MS Access still as a hold-over from when Me V5.0 was released.

Blam… now I find myself not out of work, but out of *that* work and I’m sort of at a loss as to what V6.0 is… or is it V5.5? … I’m too young to be V.Retired.

My company has some design documents they expect me to review while waiting for an embedded C contract to open up… them: “do you know C?” me wondering WTF… “…well, I’ve done C# for 5 years although there’s a guy downtown will swear I don’t know it (reference the post last week about my interview). I did C++ for 10 years prior to that, and oh yeah… so 15 years ago I did a stint in C for a couple years, so yeah… I know C” … embedded C… I’ve been doing UI since 1981… now reference the article at the top of the page.

Is that the ‘suck it up’ point? is V6.0 really sucking up the fact that I’m going to maybe finish off this career by strapping on the WABAC machine and writing embedded C? because how long could I really do that before I wouldn’t be able to get a job doing .NET stuff anymore … but that may be rhetoric based on that last interview anyway.

In some respects I feel my blog has taken up space that could have been filled by really learning more, but at the same time, it’s taken on a life of it’s own and is almost like a 2nd job. I don’t want to abandon that and all the readers, yet there’s only so many hours in the day… and speaking of that, I’ll be driving farther now.

Friday I walked past the courtyard at my client’s facility and there were a couple guys out there drinking coffee and smoking and talking on a break. I thought it would be nice to have a job like that… one that you knew you could work for 30 years and then pack it in… but then I realized the flaw in that whole concept is that I’m not like that… I want to learn new stuff, and keep learning… and that’s what got me into this whole Revolting Development.

Silverlight, WP7, Lightswitch, MVVM, UnitTesting, and on and on… it’s a never-ending stream of knowledge and information. You either pick one and hope you can ride it for as long as you need, or you keep chasing it all and try to hang on. You pays your dime, you takes your chances… or maybe as B.B. King sings “Nobody loves you but your mama, and she might be jivin’ too” … or maybe it’s too late on a Saturday night at the end of a really crappy 2 week run…

But I do know one sure thing… on Monday morning I’ll be driving about 40 miles to an office I don’t know wherethehellitis… to be doing ihavenoclue… or forhowlongitwilllast… and that worries me.

Fugly code

TehGrumpyCoder — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:20:58 GMT

OK... particularly fugly code... wow.

I'm about 2/3 of the way refactoring this huge beast of an application. I'm pulling SQL out of the code behind and putting it into the database layer. I'm using StringBuilder to avoid the loooooong chained together strings they used. Anything possible, I'm pushing to Oracle.

But some of the worst is the client-side code. Multiple times I've found 60 or 80 non-breakable spaces to move something to the right! Data entry forms with 6 rows of data to fill out, and when I try to fix up the UX, things blow up and I find a label that's only in there to space something out... sigh.

I've mentioned some of this before, but today's challenge is a 6-row form that's not-exactly orthogonal in it's layout. Of course I didn't really notice that until I started working on it. The reason it's not lined up both horizontally and vertically is because it's a table cell of a set width, and all 6 display rows are just non-breakable space-separated elements that wrap and make up the display ... seriously!

I missed out on classic ASP, and came in on the tail-end of .NET 1.1, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be advisable in either of those, and it's a total Pain in the A$$ to straighten out.

Just thought I'd share ... at least I know what I'm going to be doing all morning!

Why I hate Software Forums

TehGrumpyCoder — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:22:28 GMT

I'm a big fan of being a self-starter, always learning, and trying new stuff. A big percentage of what I've learned in the software biz has been ratting around in other people's code...

I had one Fortran IV class back in '67 and I sucked at it. I had some 1-on-1 help from a great guy teaching me BASIC in '68, and since then it's been Assembly (how many people bought their own copy of MASM?? -- twice??), Pascal, C, C++, C#, various databases, and forgetabout all the OS versions from mainframes to 8086 BIOS code and then out to Silverlight 3.

And I had to learn all that on my own. I'm not complaining, I'm just sayin'...

But apart from a few things, I did NOT learn them on forums. Well, forums didn't exist for half of that, but you know what I mean.

I particularly hate asking questions on forums and avoid it at all costs. And why? Because of the people that troll the forums to respond to questions to get their 'stats' up.

Case in point... I need to read a Word doc. NOT a docx, We're talking Office 2003 (in 2009). More specifically, I've got a doc that has a bunch of fields the user fills out, and I need to import that data from a web page and populate a web form then push it into the database.

In writing code 42 years, I've not had to become an Office Interoperability expert, and I have no need to do so now.. I just need to read this freakin' form.

So I spend a whole bunch of time in search engines seeing other people asking for the same information and getting a lot of the same answers:

A two-liner instantiating a class with no other explanation, and HTF is that supposed to help
A link to MSDN -- geez that was the first stop and got me part way
Code that is obviously broken -- don't bother downloading
Code that doesn't work when you try to run it

And my favorite(not):

The guy that decides it's his job to make the questioner 'learn how to do this' rather than 'give him code' -- I've seen them actually say that.

Hey AHole... go back to WOW or whatever it is you did before you became a computer guru in HighSchool. If I wanted to LEARN Office Interoperability, I'd dig into it. Meanwhile I've got a manager standing in my cubicle waiting for this code.

Yeah I know, push a button and go on, but there are a LOT of those folks out there, and I don't understand what it is they think they're accomplishing other than driving away people that are trying to pick up some knowledge.

I tried for a while to answer questions on the [...] forum, but unless you camp out on the forum hitting F5 every 10 seconds, it's impossible to respond to someone without overwriting someone else's post. I don't know what some of those guys do for a living, but I'm sorry, I have to get product out the door and don't have time to try to race someone to answer every forum post.

My hat is off to all of you that persevere and post thoughtful helpful responses on the forums and take time to actually read what the questioner writes before you post an answer.

And as long as I'm posting this, I will say that UtterAccess.com has the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any place I've ever been.

OK now back to trying to read FormFields. When I figure it out I'll post a solution here.

Mental Health Afternoon

TehGrumpyCoder — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:57:23 GMT

I can go a long time without time off, or at least time away from the office, but I hit tilt today.

It started early with not being able to find the code for the book to upload. Then when I did, I realized I hadn’t tracked chapter changes in the code so although the code was good, naming was wrong… fail!

Then at the office trying to finish the latest refactoring effort I got to the point of adding Help files and wanted to add a Help button in a new column in a couple places.

Things just looked hinky and man I liked how this was working and did NOT want to dork around with the html on this sucker.

But I did, and was just killing myself trying to figure out WTF… it seemed like the one and only column was over 700 pixels when everything was less than 550. I’m adding crap up with a calculator even just for sanity’s sake, and can’t find it.

So the next best thing is to pull tr sections out with my editor, refresh the UI in VS and if it is still 700, put it back in and go to the next.

There are maybe 8 rows and number 7 was it. But I’m still not seeing it. So line by line I start taking it apart and wait a minute… what’s that label… oh crap… my predecessor stuck a label in as a spacer to get a line to wrap instead of a break and that’s my 700 pixel line… $%&**#!… ok… replaced that with a br and wow… things are swell.

Saved that all out, picked up my toys, turned in my time sheet and status report, and hit the air… I’ll put the button in on Monday.

This is just the latest and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. I’ve had 60 non-breakable spaces in multiple forms, and labels as spacers isn’t new… I just thought I’d cleaned this one up… sigh.

Note to self… assume nothing, expect nothing, do it your own darn self.